REVIEW: Orchestral Transformations concert by Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra

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REVIEW BY Richard Amey. ‘Orchestral Transformations’ concert by Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra on Sunday 24 November at Assembly Hall (3pm), guest leader Adam Barker, conductor/director Dominic Grier, piano Katya Grabova. Igor Stravinsky, ballet Suite The Firebird (1919 version); Franz Liszt, Piano Concerto No 1 (1855); Bela Bartok, Concerto for Orchestra (1943).

Stravinsky and Bartok on the same orchestral concert bill in Worthing? What comfort zone is that in a provincial British town, even in the 2020s, some would ask. But town natives will look back in a few years’ time and say, “That must have been the Philharmonic with Dominic Grier. They gave me the chance to experience that kind of 20th Century masterwork for real. I’m glad.”

Nearly 80 musicians on the stage laid it all on a plate, and Liszt doubled the Hungarian content with his form-pioneering first Piano Concerto. With the Worthing Symphony Orchestra majoring on British alongside standard European, Scandinavian and Russian classical music, the Philharmonic here ventured deeper into Europe than the Austrian and Czech borders.

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In his audience welcome inside the concert programme brochure, Grier wrote: “Presenting music on this scale requires large forces and frequent rehearsals – the WPO is the only ensemble in the immediate area able to provide both. It is testimony to the considerable skills and dedication of our superb musicians that we are able to mount such programmes within the community we are all proud to serve.”

Grier added: “Worthing is enjoying a cultural highpoint with plenty of activity across arts organisations in the many excellent town venues, all within the special atmosphere of this vibrant seaside town. We are pleased to be an ever-present part of this hotbed of talent and innovation.”

Thus spake a London-based iknternational musician now having become a Worthing resident. In straitened times, this town’s minds and hearts are culturally well-provided.

As one with only limited acquaintance with Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, nothing live since BBC Prom, I found not a moment of it on Sunday that I didn’t enjoy. The orchestration sprang forwards to me, in working action, different things happening everywhere, one after another. Sometimes simultaneously. Woodwind couples successively role-playing on the same rustic Magyar melody. Sections moving physically as one. Others deliberately divided up into separate action, but complimentary. Half the strings plucking, the other bowing, just one example. Conductor permanently animated. WPO musicians on their mettle.

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All unpeeling the fruits of their weeks of rehearsal labour finally in a Bartok climax of startling originality, enthralling rhythmic brilliance, flair, and capping ultimate listening satisfaction.

As it was, too, in the Stravinsky Firebird. The music’s commissioner was Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Their choreographer Mikhail Fokine’s quote, in WPO cellist Andy Fryer’s programme note, was all the recommendation needed: “The music was superb. It expressed every moment of the tale and had unheard-of, fantastic quality.” Penny Atkins’ cor anglais, John Peskett’s distant horn, Neil Allen’s bassoon, Laura Kjærgaard-Grier’s gong, or Ethan Cook’s xylophone – all ignited the imagination within just a few notes, or a single stroke.

Romance blossoms, and there are the twin flutes of Marion Peskett and Paul Dorrell, the clarinets of Julie Schofield and Lindsay Jeffery, the harp of Alex Rider, the solo cello of Racheal Datseris – or the oboe of Clare Thornton-Wood, which at times in any WPO concert stares out of the orchestra like its unmasked soul.

And throughout, the strings, so often quietly creating indispensible backdrops, not just the now famed fairytale ambiences of Kashchey’s enchanted apple-tree garden, the shimmering rapt deliverance-joy of the wedding music’s ascending conclusion – accelerated by the fanfaring five WSO trumpets, and slammed home with a final visceral thump from the whole orchestra.

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You get none of this visual detail over car or home radio speakers. Music can only be described as genuinely spectacular when you can see it being so, live, in concert. Today you watched Stravinsky expanding the stage drama of his revered Tchaikovsky into his own new instrumental level. And you saw – at last, in Worthing – the one full-scale solely orchestral showpiece left to us by a Bartok too ill to manage more.

‘Introducing new young rising starlets’ is another WPO mission. In Liszt’s scorchingly and succinctly original 20-minute Piano Concerto, Moscow-born Kayta Grabova took the stage, took her bows, and took her exit as though bemused by even being there, and surprised by the applause and cheers. She’s still at the Royal Academy, and came to Worthing by dint of victory in the Coulsdon & Purley Festival Concerto Competition that involves WPO director Dominic Grier.

Grabova appeared in narrow black trousers, black court shoes, longish hair and a voluminous white overshirt. (Was she intent on keeping this like just another performance day at the college?) But Hungarian piano hero Liszt gives her no settling-in period, perched as she was, high on her the stool. But wow, was she ready. From that moment, head down, her double octaves set off, storming up and down the Steinway, then trilling and flowing, she made us query if we were actually in a symphony. Was this Lisztian piano really another percussion or brass section? Or is it a harp and then also a celeste?

It even began interplay with a triangle to accentuate the lightness of the frolicsome third movement – such a maturely artistic thumbed-nose by Liszt to those ready, then and since, to deride the triangle as a feeble partner amid such assertive orchestration.

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Grabova was demonstrably aware of the role of the quiet music and the short cadenzas linking the four different movements (the convention was three) in this disruptive work, so commanding in its brevity and mould-trashing form. Liszt is throwing down the gauntlet to routine contemporary concerto composition by stating, then newly re-growing its melodic material into settings which play out cyclically.

Again, the live experience counted heavily. The winds’ and viola exchanges with the piano had our eyes darting back and forth, as well as boggling at the necessary Grabova fingerwork and physicality. She and WPO were dark and threatening in the opening movement, then kaleidoscopically heroic in their rattling finale.

WPO are expanding in stature, and it’s foolish to ignore them. What they bring to Worthing classical is growing apace. Their Christmas concert listed below last season proved the biggest audience draw in the town. This year its fairytale theme forms a natural Firebird follow-on.

Richard Amey

Next concerts

Sunday 15 December – ‘Fairytale Christmas’, Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra at The Assembly Hall (3pm), leader Simon Hewitt-Jones, conductor/director Dominic Grier, with Sompting Village Primary School Choir, Worthing Choral Society.

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The ever-popular programme of seasonal favourites, carols, sing-alongs. Orchestra selections include from The Sleeping Beauty, Mother Goose, Hansel & Gretel, Cinderella.

Sunday 5 January – Viennese New Year Concert, Worthing Symphony Orchestra, conductor John Gibbons.

Kicking out 2024, to relax with waltz, polka and march favourites from the Strauss family and their contemporaries’ playlists. Plus less familiar ones vying for rightful attention.

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